Update on UTC(ESTC) Generation and Monitoring

Pierre Waller, Cedric Plantard, Andrea Samperi

Abstract:	The timescale operated at the joint Microwave-Navigation Laboratory of the European Space Research and Technology Centre was initiated in 2010 to support the on-going development, deployment and validation of the Galileo system and in particular its ground infrastructure. Based on 3 Active masers and 3 high performance commercial Cs clock, it has been continuously contributing to UTC since 2012. It has been extended over the years to provide improved level of functionality, availability, operability and performance, together with serving an increased number of users. In the year 2020, despite the restrictions related to covid, the Lab was re-located to a new larger and more modern room to support the implementation of additional clocks and associated services. One of the main challenge was to realise this migration without service interruption and with minimum impact on performances. The actual switch to the new timescale actually took place at the end of July 2020. This paper will present the new Lab facility and its associated infrastructure and will detail the migration from its old location to the new one. It will be shown that minimum impact on functionality and performance has been achieved and that those parameters are now back to full nominal values. We will also report a number of new services and functionalities introduced during this migration.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting January 25 - 28, 2021
Pages:	514 - 533
Cite this article:	Waller, Pierre, Plantard, Cedric, Samperi, Andrea, "Update on UTC(ESTC) Generation and Monitoring," Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting, January 2021, pp. 514-533. https://doi.org/10.33012/2021.17777
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